Valentine’s Day

The Lupercalia was an ancient Roman festival held on 15 February, the day after the date later given to Saint Valentine. Plutarch (c. 100 CE) describes it in his Life of Romulus: priests called the Luperci sacrificed goats and a dog, then ran through the city in strips of the sacrificed goats’ hides, striking the women they met. The women held out their hands to be struck, believing it helped them to conceive and bear children.

This is a documented pagan rite. It matters for this page only as background, because the popular claim that Valentine’s Day is “just Lupercalia renamed” is disputed (see cards 3 and 9).

The Catholic Encyclopedia says that at least three different Saint Valentines, all martyrs, are listed in the early martyrologies on 14 February: a priest at Rome, a bishop of Interamna (modern Terni), and a martyr in Africa with companions. It says the surviving accounts of the first two are “of relatively late date and of no historical value.”

Roland Kany of LMU Munich says the earliest evidence is archaeological: Bishop Julius of Rome (337 to 352) had a basilica built on the Via Flaminia where Valentinus was beheaded. Beyond that, he says, we know nothing of their lives, only legends from the sixth and seventh centuries. The two Roman and Terni figures may even be one man.

Durham University adds that the medieval Golden Legend tells of a Valentine who refused to worship idols, was imprisoned, healed an official’s daughter’s sight, and was beheaded. None of the early accounts mentions love or marriage.

A popular story says that Pope Gelasius I abolished the Lupercalia in 496 and replaced it with Saint Valentine’s Day on 14 February. Islamic and Christian writers alike repeat it.

What is documented: Gelasius did write against the Lupercalia. His tract (Tract 6, also catalogued as Letter 100, “Against the Lupercalia”) is preserved in the Collectio Avellana. What is not documented: that he introduced Valentine’s Day or put it on 14 February. LMU says there is “no evidence” he did, and that the story “is based on a fallacy from the eighteenth century.” Wikipedia says no contemporary evidence supports the idea that he, or any other pope, replaced the Lupercalia with another feast.

The first known link between Saint Valentine’s Day and courtship is in Geoffrey Chaucer’s poem The Parliament of Fowls, written around 1381 to 1382 (Wordorigins; LMU gives “around 1382”). The poem says: “For this was on seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make” (lines 309 to 310: on Saint Valentine’s Day every bird comes to choose his mate). It invokes the saint again near the end.

Durham University and Wordorigins both note that the 14 February reading is debated. Another Saint Valentine, a bishop of Genoa, had his feast in early May, and the month of May is the month of love in courtly writing. The sources give 2 or 3 May for the Genoese Valentine. Before Chaucer, LMU says, there is “not the slightest trace of love rituals on Valentine’s Day.” Gower and other late-medieval writers soon use the idea too.

In February 1477 Margery Brews wrote to John Paston III, addressing him as her “Valentine” (Wordorigins; the Catholic Encyclopedia quotes the same family’s letters).

Printed booklets called valentine writers, packed with verses to copy, were on sale in Britain by the late 1790s; one is titled Every Lady’s Own Valentine Writer, in Prose and Verse (For 1798) (Jackson Bibliography; Johns Hopkins).

In the United States, Esther Howland of Worcester, Massachusetts, received an English valentine after graduating from Mount Holyoke in 1847 and began making her own. Mass Moments dates the first American-made valentines sold to 14 February 1849. The American Antiquarian Society says she placed her first advertisement on 5 February 1850. Her business grew to about $100,000 a year, and she sold it in 1881 to the George C. Whitney Company.

Hallmark says it began with postcards in 1910, added greeting cards in 1912 and valentines in 1913, printed its own designs from 1915, and issued its first Valentine’s Day cards in 1916.

The story says Emperor Claudius II forbade young men to marry so they would make better soldiers, and Valentine married couples in secret until he was caught. Durham University finds none of the early stories link Valentine to love, and calls the claim of secret marriages “unsupported by medieval data.” LMU and My Jewish Learning agree that the stories are late legends.

In the retelling, Valentine signed a farewell note “from your Valentine” to a jailer’s daughter. The Golden Legend does have an official’s daughter, but there Valentine heals her sight and there is no note or romance (Durham University). We found no early source for the note.

The story says Roman boys drew girls’ names from a jar at a festival of Juno. Wikipedia, following the scholar Jack B. Oruch (1981), traces this to Alban Butler’s writing of 1756, later embellished by Francis Douce in 1839. There is no ancient evidence for it.

What is documented is a medieval court custom: Wordorigins describes a Valentine’s Day lottery that paired men and women of the court as valentines for the year, so the lottery belongs to the Middle Ages, not to Rome.

LMU says that, historically, the day “has nothing whatsoever to do with Lupercalia,” and that there is no trace of love customs on 14 February until the mid-fourteenth century. We report this fairly. Note that the Islamic position does not depend on the Lupercalia story: the day is the feast of a Christian saint, it carries pagan symbols (Cupid and Venus), and its practices are the dating and mixing that Islam restricts (see the Islamic position below).

Cards were being exchanged before Hallmark existed (card 5). Hallmark’s own history starts with postcards in 1910 and gives 1916 for its first Valentine’s Day cards. It made the day bigger and more commercial, but it did not invent it.

It is often claimed that Charles, Duke of Orléans, wrote the first valentine message in 1415 while a prisoner in the Tower of London after Agincourt. Wordorigins corrects this: the poem was written after he returned to France, between 1443 and 1460; Chaucer, Lydgate and Christine de Pizan had written Valentine’s Day poetry before him; and the poem is not a love message but part of a court game in which men and women were paired by lot as valentines for the year, in which Charles tells his partner he is too old for such things.

It is true that the 1969 reform of the Catholic calendar removed the feast, with the reason given that, “apart from his name nothing is known” except his burial on the Via Flaminia on 14 February (quoted by My Jewish Learning). LMU explains that many saints with a thin historical record were dropped that year, and that dioceses may keep local feasts; Valentine still appears in the calendar in Mainz, for example.

So the reform is not a ban. It is a historian’s verdict on the saint, not on the customs, and many churches still hold Valentine’s Day services.